Interracial relationships have never been the American
norm, but movies and TV are filled
with examples of those who crossed racial lines in the
name of love, family and friendship.

When AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE's new
10-hour documentary series by Jennifer Fox premieres
Sunday, September 12, 1999 through Thursday, September
16 from 9 to 11 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings),
it will explore the family life and love of an interracial
couple and their children who, until now, have experienced
happiness and hardship in relative anonymity. But
the series' debut offers a timely reminder that interracial
romance, marriage and platonic loyalties have long
prompted Hollywood to offer tales of both transcendence
and caution. From the happy dances of Shirley Temple
and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in sweetheart
classics like The Littlest Rebel, to Natalie Wood and
Richard Beymer in West Side Story as star-crossed Puerto
Rican and American lovers, to the TV classic The Jeffersons
that got laughs for George's insults to his interracial
in-laws while scoring points for multiracial family
values, movies and TV shows have frequently illustrated
diversity in love.

Guess who's coming to Hollywood?

Sidney Poitier was filmdom's leading interracial role
model in the 1950s and 1960s, starting with The Defiant
Ones, in which he and Tony Curtis starred as escaped
convicts who overcome their mutual fear and loathing
in order to survive, and build a true friendship in
the process. The film became a classic and paved the
way for a host of other black-and-white-buddy-films,
from the Lethal Weapon movies with Mel Gibson and Danny
Glover,to the current Wild Wild Weststarring Kevin
Kline,and Will Smith - who also teamed up with Jeff
Goldblum to save the world from alien invaders in Independence
Day.

Groundbreaker Poitier then went on to perform star turns
as a sensitive black man who befriends an abused white
blind girl in A Patch of Blue (with Elizabeth Hartman),
and a dashing young black professional who woos and
wins the daughter of white liberals in the classic
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (with Katharine Hepburn,
Spencer Tracy and Hepburn's niece Katharine Houghton
as his bride). While Poitier made other important film statements about friendship
and leadership in Lilies of the Fieldand To Sir With
Love, it was Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, released
at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s,
that was the first Hollywood movie to boldy suggest
that love, commitment and family might be more important
than racial differences.

That was also the message, albeit in a more bittersweet
story, in the British A Taste of Honey, which put Rita
Tushingham in the family way after a brief romance
with a black sailor. Rejected by her outraged mother,
she decides to raise the baby on her own with the help
of a fellow outcast, a white gay man, and together
they create a loving if unconventional family. But
earlier films often offered sadder endings. In Sayonara,
Marlon Brando and Red Buttons portrayed American servicemen
stationed in Japan during the Korean War who fall in
love with Japanese women (Miiko Taka and Miyoshi Umeki,
respectively). Both Buttons and Umeki won Best Supporting
Oscars as the couple who commit suicide together, rather
than be parted by the disapproving military. In Raintree
County, Elizabeth Taylor goes mad as a Civil War-era
southern belle convinced that her mammy is really her
mommy. And in The Great White Hope, James Earl Jones
is the championship boxer driven to professional defeat
and personal humiliation for marrying a white woman
(Jane Alexander) - a story based on the real-life traumas
of boxing great Jack Johnson.

Happiness continued to be elusive in A Majority of One,
in which Alec Guiness and Rosalind Russell are an aging
Asian and American couple forced to return to their
individual loneliness because they can't handle the
social ramifications of their personal affection.
And two versions of Imitation of Life - one with Claudette
Colbert in the 1930s, and another that revived the
career of Lana Turner in the 1950s - were tear-jerkers
about the downfall of a white-skinned girl who rejects
her black mother and tries to "pass" for
white, which leads to her undoing. The inescapable
moral, as Liz Taylor frequently babbles in the afore-mentioned
Raintree County, is that "All it takes is one
little drop of niggra blood and you're a niggra, too."

But in more recent years, the upbeat ideas that mixed
relationships can work and that families come in many
combinations, have dominated films with mixed-race
themes. Whoopi Goldberg has become the Sidney Poitier
of her day, starring in numerous movies with a love-knows-no-barriers
message. Among them: the romantic comedy Made in America
with Ted Danson, in which a black woman who has a daughter
by artificial insemination later meets - and falls
in love with - the secret sperm donor, who is white;
Corrina, Corrina, with Whoopi as a 1950s maid courted
by the white widower (Ray Liotta) she works for; and
Boys on the Side, with Whoopi as a lesbian who creates
a powerful extended family with two straight white
women, Mary Louise Parker and Drew Barrymore.

The power of friendship and the importance of family
- whether extended, conventional or turned upside down
- are also the core themes of several other films with
multiracial plot lines. Goldberg turns up again in
Clara's Heart, about a West Indian housekeeper who
forms a fierce maternal bond with the young white son
(Neil Patrick Harris) of a couple preoccupied by divorce.
Chauffeur Morgan Freeman is the best friend that rich southern widow Jessica Tandy has in
the lovely Driving Miss Daisy. And in the poignant
Places in the Heart, Sally Field is a sheriff's widow
in the Depression-era south who successfully becomes
a cotton farmer thanks to a black drifter (Danny Glover),
until the local Klan runs him out of town. In A Family
Thing, Robert Duvall is a good ole' boy thrown into
a mid-life crisis when he learns that his birth mother
was a black servant raped by his father; Duvall journeys
to Chicago to find his half-brother, James Earl Jones,
and to his surprise also finds a new sense of family.
A similar tale is told in the much-acclaimed British
import, Secrets and Lies, which cast Brenda Blethyn as a white working-class woman who gives her out-of-wedlock
daughter up for adoption, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste
as the black daughter who finds her - and new family
ties - more than 20 years later.

Where no white man has gone before

On the home screen, interracial relationships were originally
played for laughs or set in a more perfect future.
In took until the fictional 23rd century before William
Shatner as Capt. Kirk and Michele Nichols as Lt. Uhura
shared TV's first interracial kiss on Star Trek in
the late 1960s. Since then, humans of assorted races,
as well as creatures from throughout the galaxy, have
found true love together in Star Trek's various incarnations.
Decades before, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were America's
favorite TV couple - even though the famous redhead
and her real-life Cuban husband encountered much public
and industry flack for their multi-cultural union.
And a few years before the trekkers started smooching,
Bill Cosby and Robert Culp broke TV casting tradition
when they co-starred as bantering pals and American
agents of equal rank in I Spy.

In the 1970s, the TV phenomenon Roots shattered some
of America's ignorance and naivete about its past and
launched an era of greater visibility for African-Americans
on TV. And while it was Diahann Carroll as Julia who
was the first black star of a family-themed sitcom
in the early 1960s, it was Bill Cosby who, in the 1980s,
redefined mainstream America's view of modern African-American
family life with The Cosby Show - a big hit that further
opened doors for scores of sitcoms with black or more
broadly integrated casts. The 1980s and early 1990s
also saw the development of more fully integrated prime
time dramas, from Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhereand L.A. Law to NYPD Blue, Law and Order, Homicide
and ER. These programs successfully went out of their
way to showcase mixed friendships, black family life,
and the occasional interracial romance. Given these
successes, it's still a mystery to many TV critics
that the acclaimed I'll Fly Away, with Sam Waterston
and Regina Taylor as a white lawyer and his back maid,
both coping with social and family changes in the 1950s
south, failed to click with viewers.

Still, as a result of the many taboo-breaking programs
that went before, contemporary TV characters more often
enter into interracial relationships, and they do so
with both greater ease and more frankly-voiced concern.
One of the Sisters dated a black man, as did Ally
McBeal, and mixed couples pop up from time to time
on the soaps. On ER, Drs. Peter Benton and Elizabeth
Corday (Eriq LaSalle and Alex Kingston) seemed to have
more trouble with their conflicting schedules than
their cultural differences. Real-life interracial couples appear frequently on the afternoon
talk shows, as well as the new version of The Newlywed
Game. And, if the production and debut of AN AMERICAN
LOVE STORY are anything to go by, the modern media
message seems increasingly to be that love and family
can and should be color blind. Sixties singer Janis
Ian would no doubt be pleased; Society's Child seems
to be growing up.